Content Warning: This post deals with topics related to violence and personal safety.
Dr. Conklin is back with a fifth tip about targeting when you are defending yourself.
Video Transcript:
Hi, everyone. My name is Dr. Annalijin Conklin. I am here today because I have been doing martial arts since the age of eight and have 25 years of active practice experience. So I’d really like to use this opportunity to share some safety tips that will hopefully be beneficial to you.
So, safety tip number 5. Let’s say you’re still in a situation where someone is really close to us, may even make contact with our bodies. I would suggest that at that point, the best part that you can use of your body is your elbow or your knee. So rather than try and kick and certainly not kicking very high, you don’t really wanna kick high when you’re in a street kind of scenario/context for self-defense, ‘cause obviously kicking high, that’s a vulnerability. Someone can grab your leg and flip you down, and you don’t want that. So if someone’s very close really, and ideally before they’ve totally made contact with you, you wanna either give an elbow, or if they’re very close to you and let’s say you’re at a club and you don’t have much space, you know, lift your knee and if you’re facing that person chances are it’s gonna go into their groin. It’s gonna cause some pain and a bit of initial discomfort. Enough that it might give you those two, three seconds to run away.
So where are we targeting? I kind of mentioned one target there, which is the groin for your knees. And ladies, you probably often wear heels or stilettos. Those are awesome weapons, awesome weapons if you stomp someone’s foot on the instep, that’s extremely painful, and there’s a lot of small bones in there and with a pointed heel, you’ve got some good chances of causing enough pain that again you can escape. Probably not in your heels, you might wanna take those off, but worst case if you run in your heels, you can stomp with your foot on instep. You might wanna also target the knee. And you can also knee and knee, right? You can use your knee to hit someone else’s knee, especially if the angle is such that a knee is what’s called a hinge joint, so if you target it on the side of that hinge joint, it’s extremely vulnerable. So again, these are things you gotta practice, right? Targeting is something you need to practice. But we’re looking at the groin, but mainly you wanna target vision, airway, and transportation. Transportation’s your feet, right? And then the eyes or even the temples, if you hit the temples hard enough, say with an elbow, that’s pretty effective, you can actually knock someone out if you hit the temple at the right spot with the same amount of pressure.
The bridge of the nose is extremely painful, right? So your airway, or perhaps not the mouth so much, but certainly the bridge of the nose is part of the airway that you wanna target, but the neck, right? The throat. The Adam’s apple that men have that you often see, right, is where you wanna target. Palm, strike to the face or even the throat. Elbow, strike to the temples to the throat again, and you can knee the groin, possibly knee the knee. Your knee might actually match, you know, more their knee, and you might even have to go up to get to their knee, for example. So you gotta learn those things with different people. Or stomping the foot. I mean, any part of your body is essentially a weapon, but those are probably the strongest weapons as a woman that also won’t incur as much damage. If you try and punch empty-handed, even professional boxers break their hands, so palm strike it if you really feel like you have to use your hands or that’s all you have available. And scratching. Scratching and pinching, you know, poking that eye.
I know it probably seems really gruesome and gross to think about it, but at the end of the day, it’s your survival, and if you’re thinking about it, you’re protecting yourself. That can sometimes help you get over the icky part of some of the targeting.